Monday, June 30, 2014

Here's one possible map of what a portioned Iraq (and Syria)
might look like (from the Gulf2000 Project):

The tripartite division reflects shifting alliances that
more closely align with existing ethnic and religious realities. Post-invasion
Iraq has more segregation but perhaps no harder feelings between groups than it
did under Saddam's rule. People who doubt the latter assessment will do well to
remember the harsh, ongoing repression of Shiites by Saddam's regime that
culminated in a brutally squashed rebellion following the first Gulf War.

Sending a few advisers will not accomplish goals that the US
could not achieve in ten years of occupation. Similarly, giving a relatively
small amount of aid to Syrian rebels ($500 million) seems unlikely to shift the
balance of power against Assad. Instead, both efforts will most probably end up
wasting US tax dollars and perhaps US lives.

General Colin Powell was wrong when he told President Bush that if we break a country, then we have a responsibility to fix it. Powell's comment, which I appreciate ethically, incorrectly presumes that the US can fix any problem it creates. What has happened in Iraq is a poignant warning against the dangers of hubris. A nation can create problems, especially abroad, that it cannot solve.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

The recent capture of Mosul and other northern cities by the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is the most recent indicator that Iraq is
a dysfunctional state.

At the time of the US invasion in 2003, I predicted one of
two outcomes: another dictator would replace Saddam Hussein or Iraq would split
into three separate states comprised, respectively of Kurds, Sunnis, and
Shiites. The inability of Iraq's million strong military and uniformed police
forces to defeat ISIS's seven to fifteen thousand fighters underscores that the
billions of dollars and thousands of lives that the US invested in training those
forces was largely wasted.

In much of Iraq, loyalty to tribe, clan, ethnicity, and
religion trumps national identity. The relative calm that the US surge produced
in 2007-2008 resulted from the US buying the cooperation of competing factions
rather than any fundamental enduring change to Iraq's culture. Iraq's only hope
of defeating ISIS depended upon reducing its citizens' conflicting loyalties of
its citizens and create a broadly held, firm sense of national will and
identity. Positive assessments of what the US achieved during its decade long
occupation of Iraq reflect the need of people on the ground and those who sent and
funded the mission to believe that their efforts were not in vain. However, events
in Iraq following the US withdrawal are the real measure of what US efforts
achieved. By that standard, the occupation was a failure.

National boundaries in the Middle East and much of Africa
are a legacy of colonialism. European nations, for example, drew the boundaries
of Middle Eastern nations following the WWI defeat and collapse of the Ottoman
Empire. Those boundaries, not surprisingly, reflect the concerns and desires of
the European nations that drew the boundaries and not the ethnic, religious, or
political realities of the Middle East. Illustratively, significant Kurdish
populations live in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Azerbaijan. When colonial empires
collapsed and former territories received their independence, the boundaries
remained as the Europeans had drawn them with little effort to accommodate demographic
and political realities. Those boundaries have largely endured because of dictators
ruled through force, ruthlessly imposing their will or restless populations
such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Bashar al-Assad and his father in Syria,
and leaders including Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak in Egypt.

As a military chaplain, I spent much of my time counseling individuals.
For me, the most frustrating cases involved individuals who could, if they had
chosen, changed their situation without much difficulty or effort. However,
these persons frequently preferred to live with the status-quo than to make the
requisite effort and to endure the pain of adjusting to a new normal.

Sadly, the same holds for nations: we can point the way, but
not coerce change. In the words of the familiar adage, one can lead a horse to
water but not force it to drink.

One essential pre-condition of democracy is that a
sufficient percent of a people must want democracy badly enough to pay the cost
of fighting to establish and then to preserve that democracy. The Arab Spring signaled
that across the Middle East, people want to live in a democracy. Time will show
whether the Arab Spring is part of the birth pains of new democracies or, as
seems more likely (e.g., in Libya and the opposition to Assad), indicative of
growing desire for democracy that lacks the strength and momentum to establishing
democracy will require. If the latter, then the Arab Spring will end in the
emergence of a new set of dictatorial regimes, some of which will veil their
repressive policies in Islamist rhetoric. The US, a much-hated nation, cannot
unilaterally force the birth of democratic regimes, a lesson that recent failures
in nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan should have reinforced.

The collapse of Iraq will adversely impact the world's oil
supply and jeopardize the perilous stability in other Middle Eastern nations
including Saudi Arabia. This is likely to send the price of oil higher, tighten
supplies in global petroleum markets, and put the already slow economic
recoveries in Europe, the US, and elsewhere at risk. None of those consequences
is attractive. However, the only alternative appears to be once again taking
military action in the Middle East, a step that will alienate more Arabs and
Muslims, add fuel to Islamist rhetoric and forces, and further destabilize that
volatile region. Sometimes the best part of wisdom is to recognize the limits
of what one can do and to resist the temptation to act in the absence of
constructive options.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Conflict is inevitable, whether within a family unit, social groups and
institutions, and even the church. The question is not whether you will experience
conflict but how you will deal with the conflict that you experience.

In this morning's gospel reading (Matthew 10:24-39) Jesus declares
conflict to be inevitable. He advises his disciples—us, in other words—to
emulate him and the ways in which he dealt with conflict. The gospel
underscores three principles.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

When I was in high school in the late 1960s and college in
the early 1970s, I thought that US laws banning or discriminating against the
Communist party were hypocritical.

On the one hand, I had read enough of Karl Marx's writings
and other communist authors to recognize that although some communist ideals
were admirable, Marx' prescription for achieving those ideals through the
dictatorship of the proletariat was severely flawed. Studying economics,
religion, and psychology in college confirmed that assessment, as did an even
cursory and second-hand knowledge of life in the Soviet Union, China, and other
communist countries.

On the other hand, the US Constitution promises freedom of
the press, freedom to gather with people of one's own choosing, and implicitly
recognized the right to one's own thoughts. Laws banning or discriminating
against the Communist party seemed incompatible with those Constitutional
rights and unnecessary, given the problems inherent in Marxism. I was confident
that the vast majority of Americans would firmly reject Communism, no matter
how attractive they found some of its rhetorical flourishes or promises.

Redbaiting and hating achieved its high water mark through
the incendiary and bigoted bombast of Joseph McCarthy, a Republic Senator from
Wisconsin. Sadly, most politicians, including President Eisenhower, lacked the
moral courage to challenge McCarthy's denunciation of Americans as Communists frequently
without his having substantial evidence to justify those claims. Thankfully, a
couple of key Supreme Court decisions combined with shifting public opinion
against the excesses led to McCarthy's downfall. The Communist Party retains,
some seven decades later, its unpopularity in this nation. Both the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union's demise incontrovertibly underscore the
ideological and political bankruptcy of Communism.

I do not support the BCF nor do I agree with many of its
doctrinal positions. The BCF is an evangelical Christian group that began after
I graduated from Bowdoin and is affiliated with Inter-Varsity. Among my
disagreements with the BCF are my strong support for same-sex relationships and
my affirmation that Christianity is one of many valid, vital spiritual paths.

However, ending official recognition of the BCF, which will
prevent the BCF from being an official part of campus life and having access to
campus facilities, is hypocritical. Bowdoin promotes itself as a bastion of
liberal education. Liberal education should connote space in which to explore
ideas, even those that many regard as wrong or silly.

In my long service as a Navy chaplain, I staunchly defended
the right of people from widely divergent faith traditions to gather in spite
of opposition from conservative Christian elements and sometimes from the chain
of command. Never once did I, or any command with which I served, find that
protecting religious freedom diminished unit morale or mission effectiveness. Fears
of those adverse consequences were always overblown. Sailors and Marines
generally had too much good sense to succumb to the blandishments and
enticements of even the most disliked religious groups.

Similarly, I have found that the best antidote to allegedly Christian
but in fact silly versions of Christianity—whether the prosperity gospel of TV
evangelists like TD Jakes or narrow-minded fundamentalism of groups like
Inter-Varsity—consists of lovingly but persistently offering an alternative Christian
vision. Persons receptive to weighing the merits of their ideas and values
willingly engage in genuine dialogue, regardless of their current beliefs.
Other persons must test alternative ideas and values for themselves by
subscribing, at least temporarily, to those ideas and values, a process that is
a normal part of human maturation. Most people eventually develop a set of
ideas and values that enable the person to function as a reasonably healthy and
productive member of their community.

When a community has a steadily increasing number of young
adults who fail to develop the ideas and values requisite for a reasonably healthy
and productive lifestyle, then the community's elders and larger society should
become alarmed. The community is rapidly becoming dysfunctional and alienated,
signs of social disintegration. In the US, those signs of social disintegration
are evident in some segregated inner city neighborhoods in which unemployment,
out of wedlock births, single parents raising children, and multi-generational
dependence upon welfare are all dramatically increasing. The signs of social
disintegration, including high rates of alcoholism, have also been evident on
Native American reservations for generations.

Bowdoin College (and most other bastions of political
correctness!) does not exhibit any of those warning signs. Bowdoin is an
academically elite institution that draws the majority of its student body from
America's privileged class. The cost of enforcing political correctness by banishing
groups whose ideology one finds offensive, whether because of their religious
fundamentalism or political extremism, is therefore hypocritical and
self-defeating. Exposing students to the BCF and its woefully inadequate and
unjust interpretation of Christianity denies Bowdoin students a valuable
opportunity to test the waters, to explore different ideas, and to appreciate
more fully why liberalism rightly endorses diversity and pluralism, confident
that most people will reject narrow-minded prejudice in favor of respect for the
dignity and worth of all.

For those not persuaded by my confidence in people, that
confidence is the basic premise of democratic governance: most people will
generally choose wisely.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Many people, particularly many Americans, wrongly believe
that private enterprise is always more efficient and less expensive than
government. Here are two examples of where government, even with its
inefficiencies, can outperform private enterprise.

First, some activities are natural monopolies. Relying upon
government avoids the excess profits that monopolies (and even oligopolies,
which are markets dominated by just a handful of suppliers) seek to extract.
Providing cellphone and broadband internet access are presently examples of
natural monopolies. A friend with whom I discussed this issue told me about a
friend of his who had better cellphone and broadband access in Afghanistan's
Swat valley than in Maryland and Virginia. If that anecdotal evidence is
insufficient to change your thinking (and doubting the persuasiveness of
anecdotal evidence is always a good idea), then carefully examine this table compiled
using OECD data:

Lowest
subscription prices in each country, in dollars per megabit per second of
advertised speed, Sept. 2012.

South Korea

75.0

Greece

$1.25

Netherlands

61.4

Turkey

1.12

Denmark

40.0

Spain

.74

Britain

35.8

Italy

.64

Sweden

30.7

Ireland

.61

Spain

30.7

Austria

.56

Portugal

30.7

United States

.53

France

30.7

Switzerland

.47

Canada

30.7

Portugal

.46

Greece

24.6

Germany

.40

Australia

24.6

Czech Rep.

.40

Czech Rep.

23.0

Britain

.39

Italy

20.5

Canada

.39

Austria

20.5

Denmark

.36

Australia

Japan

19.5

.34

United States

16.9

France

.23

Germany

16.0

South Korea

.22

Finland

15.4

Finland

.22

Sweden

Turkey

10.2

.11

Switzerland

10.0

Netherlands

.08

Ireland

8.2

Japan

.04

Clearly, the US, the world leader in developing the internet
and broadband technology, has failed in making that technology readily and
affordably available.

Second, research indicates that in 2011 Medicare and
Medicaid fraud cost US taxpayers something between $82 and $272 billion dollars.
The problem is not government inefficiency or ineptitude but an unnecessarily
expensive and convoluted healthcare system that invites fraud. As bank robber
Willie Sutton replied when asked why he robbed banks, "That's where the
money is." $272 billion is 10% of US spending on healthcare and 1.7% of US
GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

The solution recommended by the editors of The Economist, which is not exactly a
left-wing publication? Streamline healthcare delivery by establishing a
national healthcare system. ("That’s
where the money is," The
Economist, May 31, 2014) Healthcare is a natural monopoly because few
consumers have the knowledge to make intelligent choices about providers and
treatments; furthermore, consumers often seek healthcare in times of crises,
when time is critical, and trust providers to do what is right. Both of those
factors keep consumers from making the type of informed choices upon which free
markets depend for effective functioning. Therefore, healthcare providers often
become de-facto monopolists or oligopolists, charging exorbitant rates in the
absence of meaningful competition.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Recently,
I read Edward Dreyer's history of wars in China during the first half of the
twentieth century, China at War:
1901-1949 (London: Longman, 1995). Unless you have a particular interest
in, and background knowledge of, those wars I do not recommend that you make
the effort to read this specialist volume. What drew my attention to the book
was that my father had served in the U.S. Navy in China during WWII, assigned as
the personnel officer of a then highly secret unit—the Sino American
Cooperative Organization. That unit received only one oblique reference, and
then by another name that I recognized only because I was familiar with unit's
the history.

One of
Dreyer's paragraphs, unrelated to WWII, did catch my attention. In the late
1920s,

Sun
Yat-sen had independently evolved many of the features of Leninist party
organization (a small corps of professional revolutionaries supported by a
larger body of dues-paying members, all obeying the party leader through a
cellular organization). Communism used the same structure to serve an entirely
different theory of history—whose pretensions to scientific status were taken
more seriously than they would be today—according to which a Chinese Communist
Party might be considered premature. (pp. 120-121)

Sun
Yat-sen was the driving force behind a movement to supplant the last Chinese
imperial dynasty with a democratic republic. His model was the United States; he
drew particular inspiration from the US Constitution. The Chinese republic quickly
floundered, leading to the Nationalist movement under Chiang Kai-shek's
leadership that, following WWII, unsuccessfully competed for dominance with the
Communists, led by Mao, in China.

What
struck me about Dreyer's paragraph was that both sides in the future conflict
initially relied upon the same organizational strategy to establish themselves:
"a small corps of professional revolutionaries supported by a larger body
of dues-paying members."

That
resembles, although expressed in secular terms, the organizational pattern of
the Christian Church. We don't have dues paying members, but we do have members
who contribute tithes and offerings. Although individuals determine how much to
give (unlike organizational dues and unlike the thankfully repudiated pew rent
system of previous centuries), a large number of donors supports a small cadre
of professional revolutionaries (aka the clergy).

I like
the image of the clergy as professional
revolutionaries. Theoretically, Christianity is a revolutionary endeavor,
intended to reorient a community and people radically toward the living God by
following the Jesus path. The term professional
revolutionary avoids baggage laden biblical terms such as evangelist and missionary while preserving the underlying concept. Of course, many
people find the term revolutionary
even more troubling, because that term suggests that Christianity initiates
radical change. Tellingly, contemporary biblical scholars attribute Jesus'
death to the Romans regarding him as a revolutionary, providing an appropriate
role model for clergy ordained in his service.

The
Constantinian settlement that led to the establishment of the Church as the
official religion of the Roman Empire brought many advantages. Unfortunately, one
significant disadvantage that resulted from establishment is that the clergy
ceased to be professional revolutionaries and instead became professional
guardians of the status quo. No longer did most clergy believe that they needed
to change the world and people radically; after all, the Christian world was
supposedly just that, Christian.

Yet
there is a dramatic and substantive dissonance between the gospel and the
world, e.g., the practice of radical love is exceptionally rare. Perhaps
William Stringfellow and others correctly characterize today's Church as existing
in a period of Babylonian captivity. Alternatively, but with a wry sense of
humor, we Anglicans might appropriately refer to the Church's present situation
as a Victorian captivity.

Our
clergy too often fill a role, and those who sit in the pews too often expect
their clergy to fill a role, more akin to that of chaplain or pastor (i.e., caring
for the people of God, especially by maintaining the status quo). This is a
legacy of establishment, when people thought Christendom was synonymous with
civil society. Consequently, many clergy no longer function in the more
challenging role, especially in this era of postmodern skepticism, of
missionary (i.e., a professionally revolutionary who brings the life-altering
message of Jesus to broken, hurting people).

What
might happen if we Episcopalians re-conceptualized the role of our parish clergy
from pastor/chaplain to professional revolutionary? What might happen if our
clergy began to think of themselves as professional revolutionaries and to act
accordingly? What would happen if clergy spent 90% of their time with the
unchurched and 10% of their time with the church people whose giving pays their
stipend AND if the church expected (or even demanded) this pattern of ministry?
In short, perhaps it's time that we took our commitment to emulate Jesus more
seriously, recognizing that Christendom—if it ever existed—is long gone.

Karl Barth, a leading twentieth century theologian, argued
that without the Bible no one could know that God truly existed, much less
enter into relationship with God. The Bible is obviously a human book. Apart
from personal religious experience, such as hearing God speak or God guiding a
biblical author to speak or write certain words or ideas, the Bible could not connect
anyone with God. In other words, Barth maintained that the basis of Christian belief
is second-hand religious experience: contemporary Christians trusting the
experience of biblical authors and editors to describe God and God's message for
humanity accurately.

Although Barth exemplifies dependence upon second-hand
religious belief, he is far from alone in holding that position. Great swaths
of the Christian tradition agree with him.

Dependence upon second-hand religious experience begs two
important questions:

Why did people once, but
no longer, directly experience God?

Which, of all the numerous
allegedly second-hand experiences of God, whether from one's own religious
tradition or another tradition such as Buddhism, second-hand religious
experiences are reliable? Why trust those experiences and distrust other
ones?

At the opposite end of a spectrum of thinking about
religious experience lies atheism, which maintains that whatever religious
experience may be, it is not an experience of the divine because God does not
exist. Since God does not exist, genuine experience of the holy or the ultimate
is manifestly impossible.

The great difficulty with atheism is that proving God's non-existence
is impossible because nobody can prove the non-existence of anything. Nobody
can be every place (remember how gigantic the cosmos is), experience every
aspect of all that exists (think of the present impossibility of directly
apprehending a quark or other sub-atomic particle, too small to observe
directly so known only by their effect).

Between those two extremes lies a vast assortment of types
of experience that may suggest or represent a personal encounter with a force
(or something) that humans variously call God, Spirit, the ultimate, etc. William
James in his classic study, The Varieties
of Religious Experience, contended that science should take those
experiences seriously. The experiences are too pervasive and too powerful in their
positive transformative effects on humans to ignore. James denied that he
believed in God, yet saw in religious experience evidence of something that
exists but is not amenable directly to scientific observation or study.

Nicholas Lash, Emeritus Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity
at the University of Cambridge, in his book Easter
in Ordinary, commented about James' ideas:

In religion, as elsewhere, genius
held an inordinate fascination for James, who was not much interested in more
humdrum personalities. The case studies, in Varieties,
are not drawn from the ranks of 'your ordinary religious believer, who follows
the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian,
or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to
him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by
habit. It would us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must
make search rather for the original experiences which were the patter-setters
to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences
we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit,
but as an acute fever.' Some like it hot, and James was much more interested in
those 'intenser experiences' that occur in 'the hot place in a man's
consciousness … the habitual center of his personal energy,' and in the type of
person who operates from this center at fever pitch, than he was in 'the
experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call
them philosophical rather than religious.' (p. 45, quoting James' The Varieties of Religious Experience,
pp. 15, 44, 162, 44.)

Religious experience may take the form of an interior
journey that leads one ever deeper, until one experiences what some described
as the ground of being (Tillich) and others characterize as groundlessness
(Buddhism). Alternatively, one may journey outwards, experiencing the unity
nature of all that exists (e.g., Eckhart, Lao Tzu, or Sankara) or the in the
unity of one with another (Buber's I-Thou relationship). In addition to experiencing
the unitive nature, either through an interior or exterior journey, other characteristics
of religious experience are that the experience is noetic, ineffable, transient,
and liberating. These qualities of religious experience cut cross religious traditions,
as evidenced by the citation in this paragraph's first two sentences of six
different religious traditions.

Seeking personal religious experience also offers a more
promising approach to scriptural interpretation than does Barth's reliance upon
second-hand experience. We believe Scripture inspired not because God dictated
or guided its writing but because readers have traditionally experienced
scripture as a window through which the light of God shines, illuminating the
spiritual path. Authors of the Bible were human, exactly as we are. God acted
then, in their lives, as God acts today, in our lives. This view of Scripture
accommodates religious pluralism better than other perspectives on the Bible's
inspiration do. Also, this view better accords with our understanding of how
God acts in the world today, luring or nudging, rather than controlling or
intervening in spectacular ways.

If you hold religious beliefs, what is the source of those
beliefs? Is it your own personal religious experience or is it second-hand? In either
case, why do you trust the experience?

Monday, June 2, 2014

Two items in the Church Times, a British newspaper
that focuses on the Church of England, recently caught my attention.

The first was an article by Madeline Davies, Covenant:
‘We’ll turn our key if you turn yours’, posted May 23, 2014. The article
describes the current stalemate in progress toward the reunion of the Church of
England and the British Methodists.

The second article was by Paul Wilkinson, Green
light for Leicester burial for Richard III, also posted on May 23. The
Church of England's Leicester cathedral has successfully defeated a legal
challenge by a handful of Richard's descendants who wanted to bury his remains
in York, the seat of his power. The Leicester cathedral will now spend £1
million on his re-interment.

Both stories illustrate reasons why organized religion is
losing ground to the spiritual but not religious. British Methodists split from
the Church of England in the decades following John Wesley's death in 1791. They
now number just over a quarter of million, too small a group to wield much influence
in Great Britain. Meanwhile, the Church of England is experiencing struggles
similar to those of its American cousin, the Episcopal Church: declining
attendance, maldistributed church buildings and parishes, and grossly
inadequate finances. The issues that keep the Anglicans and Methodists apart
are unimportant to virtually all outsiders, e.g., issues of ecclesial
organization that effect how church people wield power. In the face of growing
secularism, Christian unity—especially unity that honors diversity—offers a
stronger, more attractive witness than stubbornly insisting on having one's own
way over issues about which few people care.

Concomitantly, spending £1 million to rebury a long-dead king—regardless
of his historical importance—seems irrelevant to the mission of bringing God's love
to a broken, hurting world. Let the United Kingdom pay to rebury Richard, if
there is the political will to do so. Let the Church spend its money to feed
the hungry, both spiritually and physically. When the Church shifts its focus
away from its core mission, then the skeptics shout about our hypocrisy and the
interested but unaffiliated find spiritual but not religious more appealing.